What's Wrong with the Digital Signage Industry!?!

While reading another ridiculous article on digital signage forum this morning, I felt myself reaching a boiling point. This article is symbolic of all that's just wrong in the digital signage industry today. Is it any wonder the digital signage industry is dying?

Pseudo Journalism

There are so many things wrong with this article it's hard to enumerate them all. What ever happened to integrity? Here is an article that is posted on a site that calls itself "Digital Signage News" as if what it reports on has some kind of journalistic integrity. Well, given that there is no published journalism standards policy to be found and the article doesn't even cite its author let alone back up any of its claims, it's clear that the publication isn't trying to provide those in the market for digital signage any kind of real service. So it's no big surprise when they write an article like this, flawed both in it's premise and it's conclusion, that really is intended to boost a single vendor of old school digital signage.

Let's look at what the article is saying. We'll start with their claim that digital signage networks cost tens of thousands of dollars. Yes the old way of building digital signage networks was prohibitively expensive for most businesses. However, with each new business that discovers Venue Networking it is becoming increasingly clear that the power of place-based media can be seized through solutions which carry a much lower total cost of ownership. The reasons for this are myriad but they include a shift to a software-as-a-service delivery model, the use of commodity-priced hardware, and new business models which make for dramatically lower fees both in the area of software and content management.

Now let's look at the articles specific suggestion. They claim: "If you do not require the ability to update your messages and media content remotely and a simple local update solution will do, the Sun Group range of Standalone devices are the perfect choice." What they are saying is go ahead and buy a stand alone system for digital signage - it's cheaper and it will do. Well, neither is it cheaper, nor, most would agree, will it do for most businesses when the potential of place-based media is now understood to be so much more than a static loop of content on one screen in your store.

It's all about the network...

If you are truly interested in tapping in to the potential of place-based media the network you join makes all the difference in the world. A network-based approach is the key to keeping costs down across the board - upfront costs, hardware costs, content management costs, you name it, because the costs associated with operating the network can be spread across all its members. By now the software industry has proven that it is more cost-efficient for customers to "rent" software-as-a-service than it is to buy stand-alone licensed software packages. Why would we expect place-based media to be any different? Secondly, a network-based approach is also the key to tapping into a community of potential partners who can help to defray the cost and effort of content management and who represent potential business partners that can help you turn a network of screens into a considerable profit center. Imagine someone saying to you - buy that computer with no networking capability - it's good enough.....who needs the Internet anyway. In place-based media, as in personal computers, its much more about communication and collaboration than it is about the computational power of the machine.

Pseudo journalism be gone!

Articles like this are nothing short of ridiculous. Unfortunately we see them everyday and there are a number of similar pseudo-press outlets out there calling themselves authorities in the digital signage industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's unfortunate because these outlets, and the vendors who pay them to promote their obsolete products, do much to confuse and mislead businesses who want to understand the true potential of place-based media and are looking for genuine and balanced reporting on what in fact is the real future of the industry.